Balance 526 “Blue Diamond” Hits the Water!

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Bringing The New Balance 442 to Life

By: Andrew Hodgdon, Technical Director, Balance Catamarans
Printed with Permission from Multihulls Quarterly

What’s really involved in designing, engineering, tooling and building a new catamaran?

In 2019 designers of the Balance 526 Phil Berman and Anton du Toit were discussing the best way to build on the success of their award-winning catamaran.  Due to my growing role at Balance Catamarans I was fortunate enough to be brought into the brainstorming process and excited to share my insights from the past decade as a professional multihull captain.  We started the conversation based on a trend we had noticed in the feedback from many of our customers; they loved the design and build quality of Balance Catamarans but wanted a smaller option at a lower price point.  We were eager to enter this segment of the market but needed to be cautious.

It should first be mentioned that no company will go through the process of creating a new catamaran model unless they are quite confident it will sell and have a strong market.  Creating a new design, engineering it, and building the tooling is very costly.  For that reason many builders use the same tooling for a decade a more; simply making slight revisions to it after a few years in order to call it something new. I am amazed, as a yacht broker, how many two decade old designs are still being marketed and sold, often as brand new models.  This is due entirely to the high cost of designing and tooling up a new boat.  The good news for Balance was that we had very high demand for our 526 and 482.  We knew our concepts and designs were well vetted and felt confident the market would respond favorably to an entirely new 44ft model that shared the DNA of her very popular larger sisters.

It was imperative that we capture the same soul of the 526 and 482, only this time in a more compact package.  The resulting concept was christened the Balance 442.  The objective of the 442 was to create another fully modern, daggerboard equipped, world voyaging catamaran.  It must also be truly livable for a couple or family to sail anywhere in the world, along with the expected equipment they would need to carry. The task was made easier because the boat was a refinement and scaled down version of the 526 – a tested design, with tested features.

We knew several of those features absolutely must be transferred from our flagship model over to the new 442 design.  We had to include the innovative VersaHelm, we wanted to maintain the 6’10” headroom throughout the interior, and the design had to share the same balance of livability and performance that is our namesake.  Meeting at the office of Du Toit Yacht Design in Cape Town, we began the laborious process of bringing a new Balance model to life.

The process began with an overall design brief.  Phil, Anton and I wanted to sustain a real performance orientation in the new 442 without sacrificing her livability and payload capacity. We had to decide on the basic dimensions of the new boat and the list of necessary equipment she would need to have aboard.  All liveaboard catamarans need much the same equipment – water- makers, solar panels, two engines, refrigerators, freezer, air conditioning, etc. The smaller you go in size, the more challenging it is to equip a catamaran properly and keep her light enough and narrow enough to achieve that ideal balance.  Base on those parameters, we then determined the materials we would use for her construction.  We also had to consider the size and layout of her sail plan and match it to her projected displacement to achieve our performance goals.

We accelerated the design process by taking the specifics of the Balance 482 and simply shrinking them on a computer aided design program (CAD) to see where we would have to alter the 442.  Anton then began the brand-new design by drawing the hull and cabin top of the vessel using the measurements that we’d already agreed upon.  Once we had a basic drawing, Phil and I gave our input about possible adjustments.  Let’s give the bows a slightly sharper rake.  I would prefer a rounded curve to the hardtop bimini.  Make sure the davits aren’t pushed back too far.  Eventually, spars and sails were added to the drawing. The trampoline and longeron dimensions became clear.  We decided on the perfect size and outline for the sugar scoops.  Slowly but surely the new vessel took shape on the screen.

Next, we moved the design focus to the interior.  We played around with different placements of cabinetry, lockers and heads striving to find the best fit for all the necessary equipment.  Tables moved from one side of the saloon to the other.  Companionway stairs shifted fore and aft to find the best placement in relation to the daggerboard trunks.  It became a game to see who could come up with the best idea for saving a few inches here or an extra centimeter there.  Believe it or not, we actually got out a tape measure.  We rearranged Anton’s office furniture so that we could simulate the space in a hallway or through a doorway.  We stood on a chair to determine the height of a shelf or locker.  We stacked books to see the clearance of a step.  We had to have a clear understanding of how people would live and move in these spaces, using every bit of space to the best application.  Always with the knowledge that Balance owners need to be comfortable in these spaces both at sea and at anchor.  No detail could be overlooked or disregarded.

A great design is the culmination of thousands of small decisions and subtleties that most people miss. It is always about attention to the smallest things which, if gotten right, add up to a superb finished product.  Can you sleep on her?  Lounge on her?  Is there good visibility from the helm – up or down?  Is she managed easily under power or sail?  Does she have enough cabinetry for long term storage?  Does she have enough payload to carry equipment – tenders, kayaks, etc?  Does she have enough headroom to avoid turning tall people away?  Will she perform upwind?  Will she ride over the seas or pound hard into them?  Every choice is a decision that is a balancing act between form and function- always striving to design a catamaran that is a marriage of beauty, functionality, and speed.

Once we were all happy with the overall design, we handed the project to Anton’s amazing design team to finalize.  They scoured the layout looking for imperfections.  Will this door open all the way?  Will this plumbing be obstructed? Can this angle be improved?  They put in hundreds of hours staring at every minute detail on the screen.  Finally, the revised drawings were sent to the builder, Mark Delany at Balance Catamarans Cape Town, who has the daunting job of taking the design and turning it into reality.  This inevitably leads to another round of revisions and adjustments as Mark dealt with the reality of taking a drawing and bringing it to life.  Not only did we have to design the boat well, but we had to design the boat to go together well.  So it went with all parties to the design process working together to make a great catamaran.  It is a collective belief at Balance that a total team approach to the design and build process improves our product. Disagreement, push back, and collective head scratching from as many knowledgeable parties as possible inevitably yields the best results.

It brings me great joy to play just one small part in the development of such amazing products.  I am only one person in a process that will eventually involve over two hundred others, who dedicate their professional lives to building incredible catamarans.  We are all very eager to see the new Balance 442 come to life over the next few months.  Moving from a simple design on a computer screen to a floating work of art, carrying its new owners across oceans and creating memories they will cherish for a lifetime.

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

Performance Study of Daggerboards Versus Keels

By: Phillip Berman, published with editor’s permission from Boating NZ and Blue Water Sailing

In my forty-five year career in the catamaran industry there’s been a relentless debate on the virtues and vices of daggerboards versus fixed keels. This debate has, however, mostly been waged without “hard numbers” from which to compare performance differences. As we have had requests at Balance Catamarans for both keels and daggerboards, Anton Du Toit (my design partner) and I felt we should conduct a study, the results of which follow.

When we first set out to design and construct the Balance 526 we were aiming for cruising couples who wanted more performance and quality than they could find in mass production cats, but also more interior space, payload capacity and ease of use and maintenance than consumers focusing primarily on speed. Our intent was to find the balance – not to create the “lightest and fastest 52” in the world, or the “largest 52,” but a catamaran that could sail swiftly on all points of sail, carry significant levels of payload, yet still be gracious to live on. We also wanted her to be pleasing to the eye.

Our focus at Balance brings us an interesting range of buyers, some of whom are more focused on strength, space, safety and comfort rather than all out speed (cruiser types), others who are more speed focused, less value oriented, and prepared to give up comfort, ease of operation and payload capacity to go a bit faster (racer types). The later sorts of buyers are mostly what I affectionately call “spreadsheet guys.” (Full disclosure: I am not a spreadsheet guy. I am far more focused on how a boat lives, how tough she is, what she can carry, and how simple she is to sail and maintain without a professional crew.)

As we have gone along a few of our customers have asked if we would create the 526 with performance keels rather than daggerboards. They felt that the advantages of keels trumped the performance advantages of boards. We were happy to comply, so Anton set about to design high performance keels for the 526. (Note: On our 451, we only offer her with dual daggerboards and two shallow permanent fixed minikeels. On all other Balance designs it remains customer choice which configuration they wish to have.)

What we were not prepared to do was tell 526 buyers how much faster or slower the two different configurations would be. We felt it best to heed Lord Bryon’s advice to evade “kant and hyperbole” (the language of the day at boat shows!) so we hired the Wolfson Unit for Marine Technology and Industrial Aerodynamics at the University of Southampton to conduct comparative studies of the two configurations on identical 526 models. When you are comparing identical products with just two different variables it seemed a worthwhile study to undertake and share with our customers. It also becomes, to some extent, a  worthwhile study for anyone considering a new or used catamaran purchase who is curious how the two different configurations impact performance.

While Anton and I believe these studies can be used by consumers to compare the relative performance differences between boards and keels, it is important to note that the 526 is a very light, narrowhulled epoxy performance cat and the keels we install are considerably finer, deeper and more carefullyshaped than those found on mass production designs. Additionally, we conducted the study with the daggerboards in the fully down position on all points of sail to reduce the studies complexity. The daggerboarded 526 would be marginally faster than the study indicates off- the-wind with boards raised due to a further reduction of wetted surface.

The disparity between keels and boards on a mass-production cat compared to a Balance or any other performance cat would be exaggerated considerably compared to the study that follows. I would note that we erred on the side of caution in setting our lightship weight for this study at 12.5 kg. We have carefully lode cell weighed our 5th boat and the actual lightship weight is 12,215 kg, or 26,930 pounds for the keeled 526 and 12,261 kg, or 27,030 pounds for the daggerboarded 526. Our lightship weight could be lower for customers prepared to put their boats on a diet, or sacrifice quality in several areas, but we have found that they want as much cabinetry as possible, folding tables, glass salon windows, Corian counter tops, and high-end flooring inside and out, etc. Spreadsheet guys miss the mark on this subject constantly in my experience. They also wrongly compare boats based on length, rather than the interior volume of the hulls and bridge – what I call the sum total of fiberglass parts. Regardless, the polars closely mimic the high performance our yachts have proven in real life cruising, fully laden, so this gives us great confidence in the studies accuracy.

Performance, of course, is not the be all and end all, so it is important to examine the advantages and disadvantages of boards versus keels beyond speed. They are as follows:

Advantages to Keels:

1. No moving parts. One less thing to operate or break.
2. If you ground the boat you hit the keels and they are easily repaired and at a low cost generally.
3. You can chock the boat more easily on the hard and it is easier to beach in some circumstances.
4. They cost less to fabricate.
5. You get more room amidships for additional cabinetry.
6. The keels add a bit of buoyancy. On a 526 about 1,600 pounds as our keels are large and mostly hollow inside.
7. Daggerboards are typically a bit heavier. On the 526 each board and trunk weigh about 50 pounds more.
8. Poorly designed boards and trunks can allow the boards to rattle when they are not under load. Keels do not rattle.

Advantages to Daggerboards:

1. Boarded cats point higher and side-slip less as the study shows. I have noted that on keeled production cats you can “stick them up into the wind” but they tend to crab horribly when pinched, as such that you must crack off considerably to reduce leeway and sustain momentum. On most of the sea trials I conduct on production cats we “close reach” to windward on sea trials. This is less the case on deep, finely shaped performance catamaran keels.
2. The draft on most keeled catamarans is deeper than the draft on daggerboarded cats. Our 526 keeled version draws about 12 inches more than the daggerboarded version. On daggerboarded cats the rudder tip usually represents her deepest draft. It is important to note that some cats carry very stubby keels to sustain shallower draft, but the shallower the keel the less well she performs when sailing close to the wind. This is important to keep in mind if you are comparing performance on fixed keeled production cats.
3. Off the wind with the boards raised to 1/4 there is less drag and the boat steers and sails faster and more playfully.
4. The daggerboarded cat is a bit faster and makes less leeway on nearly all points of sail as the study shows in the majority of wind conditions.
5. An equally efficient set of keels have much more wetted surface than daggerboards, almost 4 times more. This is the case on our 526 keels.
6. Daggerboards set properly can assist in preventing a cat from a “tripping capsize” in very high winds with large breaking cross seas. Both boards can be fully raised, or only the leeward board raised, so the boat can side-slip easily.
7.  Daggerboarded cats tend to have a bit higher resale value due to the fact that so few are produced in mass production. A buyer that wants boards will only focus on catamarans that have them.

Shifting our focus now to the performance data generated by Wolfson Unit. Their analysis returned the predicted boat speed and leeway angle for the Balance 526 with a keel design and daggerboard design for all combinations of true wind speed from 4 to 25 knots and true wind angles from 40 to 180 degrees. We can begin comparing these two configurations by directly comparing the speed and leeway at major points of sail, specifically beating, close, beam and broad reaching.

While beating the two designs are predicted to perform as follows:
To summarize the upwind comparison, the daggerboard design is, on average, expected to sail 1.5 knots faster and 1.75 degrees higher. While close reaching the daggerboard design has less of an advantage than when beating, as can be seen from Table 2:

While close reaching the daggerboard design is expected to sail 0.5 knots faster and 0.75 degrees higher.

As the true wind angle approaches 90° for a beam reach, the keel and daggerboards become more closely matched.

In the beam reaching comparison the daggerboard design will sail slightly higher with a leeway advantage of about 0.25 degrees but it’s speed advantage in 5 knots TWS of 0.3 knots will fade to a 0.5 knot deficit in 16 knots TWS. At this point of sail the two designs are considered to have equal performance as the differences in leeway and boat speed are negligible.

Finally, while broad reaching the following speeds and leeway’s are expected.

In summary, when broad reaching the daggerboard design regains a slight advantage, as it maintains an additional 0.5 knots of boat speed. Leeway differences are again negligible.

Considering the above analyses, it can be seen that the daggerboard design will typically not only outperform the keel design but also out point it, make less leeway close to the wind, therefore giving the daggerboard design a substantial advantage when racing, or for performance focused sailors.

This data gives a fair comparison of the two designs at specific true wind speeds and angles but in order to fully understand the performance trends and enable better predictions between them, one must consider the entire range of wind conditions and all points of sail. This is best done with the use of speed and leeway deltas, where the differences between the two designs are calculated and analyzed.

The following two figures display the average speed and average leeway deltas. The calculation process to determine the deltas is chosen such that a positive value for the delta indicates an advantage for the daggerboard design, and a negative value favors the keel design. For example, a speed delta of +2 knots and a leeway delta of -1 degrees means that the daggerboard design is 2 knots faster than the keel design under the same conditions but would sail 1 degree lower than the keel design.

Considering Figures 1 and 2, the three TWS ranges used are from 4 to 7 Knots, 8 to 12 Knots and 14 to 25 Knots and will be referred to as light, medium, and strong wind conditions respectively. By analyzing the Average Speed Deltas shown in Figure 1 below and taking a beam reach (90 degrees TWA) as the point of sail under investigation, we can determine that in light winds the daggerboard design will perform better than the keel design as the blue line (4 to 7 knot TWS range) indicates a positive delta of 0.4 knots at 90 degree TWA. We can therefore expect the daggerboard design to outperform the keel design by about 0.4 knots under these conditions.

Counter to this, while still on a beam reach but when moving from a low wind condition to a high wind condition, the keel design begins to perform better. This is now taken from the green line (14 to 25 knot TWS range) and gives a -0.6 knot reading. Therefore the daggerboard design is now expected to be about 0.6 knots slower than the keel design under the new, higher TWS conditions.

Figure 2 is used in the same manner as Figure 1 but shows the leeway angle of each design rather than boat speed. Focusing again on a beam reaching condition, the leeway deltas indicate that the daggerboard will always out point the keel design as all three lines (TWS from 4 to 25 knots) indicate. positive values of 0.3, 0.35, and 0.1 degrees at 90 degrees TWA. Overall, Figure 2 shows that the daggerboard design has a significant gain in leeway over the keel design at all wind speeds and angles. This reaches a maximum when beating (TWA ±40-45 degrees) of 2 degrees, and declines to zero when running (TWA ±180 degrees).

With respect to the average boat speed deltas, Figure 1 shows that the daggerboard maintains a higher boat speed when sailing in light and medium winds (red and blue lines in Figure 1). In stronger conditions (green line) the daggerboards yield better boat speed when beating but the keel surpasses this between TWA of 60 to 145 degrees. Keeping in mind that the study was conducted with the daggerboards fully down at all times, in reality, the daggerboards will be raised in the 60 to 145 TWA range. As such the study slightly underestimates the speed of the daggerboard design over this TWA range.

Overall the daggerboard outperforms the keel in both boat speed and leeway in the vast majority of sailing conditions and is thus considered to be the better design choice if achieving ultimate performance is the key criteria. It should be noted that this study is specific to the Balance 526, but corresponding trends can be expected in performance cats of similar size and design.

In the end, and it is a point I cannot stress enough to any boat purchaser, all boats are sets of compromises and trade-offs, and so too with features – helm designs, sheeting systems, rig layouts, bimini designs, bed designs and locations, baths, engine placement, etc. Because I have been deeply involved in brokerage catamaran sales much of my life I recognize there is no one right or wrong boat, certainly no perfect boat, only a boat that happens to be a better fit for a particular sailor and his or her budget, cruising agenda and specific aesthetic proclivities.

At least now we can say that if someone wants a 526 with keels, here is how she will perform compared to a boarded version. It is then up to the buyer to decide which configuration is the most appealing to them. I will say that, based on the five 526 we have sailing today, with over 60,000 miles of sailing behind them, those owners with keels seem quite happy, just as those with boards.

Alright spreadsheet guys, here’s your numbers to mess with!

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